A Preliminary Study On the Quantitative Standard of Statutory Compensation

At present, the compensation for intellectual property infringement damages is mostly achieved through statutory compensation, that is, the amount of compensation is directly determined by the people's court according to the idiographic cases and the range regulated by the law, which is mainly due to the inability of proving the damage caused by the intellectual property infringement.

The use of statutory compensation has significantly reduced the difficulty of proof of the parties and has also improved the efficiency of litigation, but it has been followed by questions about the fairness and impartiality of the court's judgment, including the “low compensation amount”, “the different judgments in one case”, and “the criteria and process of decision of the amount are not disclosed”. The main reason is that the determination of statutory compensation amount lacks a set of clear and operable specific standards in China even in the world, which leads to the inability to publicly determine the amount of compensation and the evaluate whether the amount of compensation is low, also leading to different trial organizations have different levels of discretion in similar cases.

The author believes that the long-term goal of establishing quantitative standards is to build a comprehensive evaluation system based on mathematical models, but it’s very complicated and difficult, and requires a lot of investment. Before that, the short-term goal or the goal of the transition period is to establish relatively clear and operable quantitative standards, accurately assess the content of behavior and damage, and ensure that there will be no huge deviations between the amounts of compensation for a period of time, and achieve open, stable, fair and other values.